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and Nan Taylor. Through Berthold, they met Victoria Ocampo.
And, as if all this wasn’t enough, Bill and Peggy Kiskadden happened to be attending some medical conference in New York, and Caskey’s mother came up from Lexington, Kentucky, to help him and
Christopher get packed. The day-to-day diary mentions several other encounters––notably with Mina Curtiss (Lincoln Kirstein’s sister), Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jean Stafford, Harold Taylor (the president of Sarah Lawrence), Jinx Falkenburg, John Hersey, the Countess Waldeck, John Horne Burns.
Christopher’s first impression of John Gielgud (September 10) wasn’t favourable. Gielgud talked bitchily about Dodie Smith––or rather about Alec Beesley, whom he disliked. This put Christopher off him––which Christopher evidently showed, for Gielgud said at a later meeting (in 1948 in London) that he had been aware he had offended Christopher and that he was sorry for it. Thus they became Berthold, it was part of his vanity as a stud to be able to enjoy sex at both age limits. “With a woman,” he once told Christopher, “I get a kick out of being the first one, or the last.”
(Aside from Berthold, only one memory of this visit to Amsterdam remains.
Auden and Christopher toured the harbor and the canals in a launch. At the end of the tour, the passengers were invited to write their impressions in a guestbook. Auden wrote two lines from Ilya Ehrenburg: “Read about us and marvel! / You did not live in our time––be sorry!”)
After this, Christopher didn’t see Berthold again for at least two or three years. At their reunion, Christopher found it odd to be able to chatter away with him in German. Christopher felt at ease with him now as with an old friend, but he had to admit to himself that the removal of the language barrier had robbed Berthold of much of his romantic mystery.
Then, in the mid-thirties, after the Nazis had come into power, Berthold started appearing briefly in London. He was working on a freighter (either Dutch or Belgian) which plied between London and some North Sea ports.
Berthold told Christopher and his friends that they were smuggling refugees into England. They brought only one refugee at a time, and they docked far up the river at a dock which wasn’t carefully patrolled. In the evening, after the customs officials had been on board, Berthold and the captain would get their refugee out of his hiding place and walk him on shore and away from the dock as though he were another member of the crew, coming with them to take a look at the town. After that, he was on his own. Sooner or later, I suppose, he would have to give himself up to the British authorities and appeal for asylum.
Sometime in 1939 or 1940 Berthold managed to return to Argentina. And then Tota and [a male friend] (another of his lovers) set him up as part owner of a factory. Shortly after Christopher and Caskey visited Buenos Aires in March 1948, Berthold got married to an Argentine girl of good family with some money of her own––thus trading in his own myth in exchange for a future of middle-class respectability.
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Lost Years
friends. Perhaps Christopher had been too hard on Gielgud to begin with. But it is still my opinion that Gielgud got nicer as a
person––and better as an actor––as he grew older.
Frank Taylor was a publisher––I think, at that time, he was still with Random House. Nan was his wife. I won’t describe them yet because Christopher didn’t really get to know them until they came out and lived in Hollywood in 1948 and after. This year, Christopher met Frank only twice. I seem to remember that he had a violent crush on Stephen and that they’d been to bed together.
Victoria Ocampo appears in The Condor and the Cows. She is
described fairly, I think, though a bit too politely. What a bullying old cunt!
It was probably in the latter part of August that Berthold Szczesny told Christopher the ghost story which is printed in The Condor and the Cows. “Told” isn’t the right word; it would be more accurate to say that Berthold performed it. He hammered on the door of the apartment early one morning, staggered in and dropped limply into a chair, muttering that he had been lying awake all night, too scared to be able to sleep. Then he let Christopher draw the story out of him, bit by bit––how he had walked into the El Morocco and seen a young man who looked vaguely familiar, a young man in a dark blue suit, rather pale-faced but quite ordinary; how this young man had come over to him from the bar and Berthold had said, “I believe we know each other,” and the young man had answered, “Certainly we know each other; you buried me in Africa”; how Berthold had recognized him then, as a shipmate on a German boat, who had died of malaria and been buried on the bank of the Gambia River; how the young man had added, “But don’t tell anyone, because I’m here on leave,” and how Berthold had felt as cold as ice all over and had run out into the street.
Berthold certainly did look badly shaken that morning, but he kept smiling apologetically, as much as to say that he didn’t expect Christopher to believe all this. The smiles were curiously convincing.
He then told Christopher that he had made up his mind to go back to the El Morocco that evening. “If he’s there I’ll walk right up to him and hit him as hard as I can, right in the face. And if he’s got a face––if there’s anything there, you understand––then I’ll pay damages, a hundred dollars, five hundred dollars, a thousand dollars
––what does it matter? Only I have to hit him––to be sure . . .”
The next day, Berthold reported what had happened: “I go back to El Morocco and there he is. Just the same as last night, sitting at the bar. And so I come up, all ready to hit him. I think he doesn’t see me. But just when I get quite close, he turns around and I see that ¾ 1947 ¾
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he’s very angry. He says: ‘I told you already––I’m on leave. I don’t wish to be disturbed.’ He says that very quietly, and he sits there looking at me. I can’t do anything. My arms are weak, just like a baby’s. I turn around and go out of the bar . . .”
After this, Berthold told Christopher that he had visited El
Morocco several more times but that the young man was never
there.
I’m not sure if Christopher ever fully believed the story. I think he did almost––though he knew that Berthold could lie with great inventiveness. (The story as Christopher tells it in The Condor and the Cows is itself faked, up to a point––that is to say, it is presented as a single unbroken narrative, because Christopher couldn’t be bothered to explain to the reader that he had heard it in installments.) Some years later, Christopher learned from Maria Rosa Oliver that
Berthold had confessed to her he had made up the whole thing.
Christopher was hugely impressed by all the trouble Berthold had taken; his playacting seemed to show a genuinely disinterested wish to entertain, which is the mark of a real artist.
I don’t remember anything worth recording about Cartier-
Bresson, Jean Stafford, Harold Taylor, Jinx Falkenburg (whose guest Christopher was on her radio interview show) or John Hersey. The Countess Waldeck was a friend of Jimmy and Tania Stern, an
amusing vivacious attractive little woman with (I suspect) a deeply shady side to her character, a sort of female Mr. Norris. I think she was some variety of Balkan Jewess but she had been tolerated by the Nazis and even entertained by a few of them. Under the name of R. G. Waldeck she had written an extremely perceptive book of memoirs centering around a hotel in Bucharest (?) called Athene Palace.[*] John Horne Burns was then quite famous as the author of The Gallery, a book which Lincoln Kirstein admired extravagantly and even Hemingway had a kind word for. A faint darkish cloud hangs over the memory of this meeting; my impression is that Burns got drunk and became hostile and tiresome. But he and “Rosie”